A Broken Robot Saved My Life

Sometimes, watching the prototype you've worked on for months fall apart could be exactly what you need.

The first time we tested our underwater robot prototype, it sank. My teammate, Eric Stackpole, and I had made big strides in the garage and were feeling hopeful. Now we were set up by my aunt's backyard swimming pool in the suburbs of San Francisco. Eric dove in with his underwater camera to capture footage while I stayed on the deck to drive. I tested the motors on land; they ran perfectly. I lowered the robot into the water and fired the forward thrusters. They worked. And then they didn't. One of the propellers stopped responding. Then they all died. Instead of gliding through the water like a curious fish in a new tank, our robot fell to the bottom of the pool like a rock.

The failing robot was the latest in a string of disappointments. I had lost my job a year earlier, in 2011, and gone through months of unemployment, unsuccessful job interviews, and dwindling savings. I realized that my problems ran deeper than a bad economy: I was underskilled. I was qualified to write emails, but not much more.

While I job-hunted, I decided to teach myself hands-on skills I'd never picked up in shop class. It was a mix of desperation and inspiration. I spent six months dabbling in everything from welding to electronics, 3D printing to sewing. I was grasping for a way forward. Ultimately, that exploration led me to partner with Eric to develop our robot, a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that we'd sell as a kit for low-budget exploration and education.

Everything was riding on that robot. When the test bombed, I was devastated. But while I moped about, Eric immediately started looking for solutions. He pulled the brushless motors off. "Must be a short here somewhere," he said. He was right—and he went on to develop a new process for waterproofing the motors. That was good engineering, but for me the breakthrough was Eric's approach to the situation. Where I saw defeat, he saw a chance to learn something new.

Mathew Scott

(Photograph by Mathew Scott)

We've now shipped close to 1000 of our OpenROV kits to every corner of the globe. And we have a community of 3000 contributors continually suggesting improvements. Our members embrace design problems as a way to innovate. Framing every glitch as an opportunity has empowered them to propose ideas that many experts would have written off as crazy or counterproductive. And that freewheeling, optimistic attitude seems to permeate the maker movement at large.

I often think back to my little moment of crisis at the pool. Today I'm glad we didn't get the waterproofing right on the first try. Otherwise, it might have taken me much longer to learn a basic lesson about innovation. Nearly every engineering advance is born of disaster.

A few weeks ago, after I gave someone a cursory introduction to the ROV, he said, "Wow—it seems so simple." I suppose that's true. Our machine has gone from a rough prototype in Eric's garage to a dependable, streamlined device comparable in function to commercial ROVs. But it took a lot of sweat and frustration to get here. We're going to keep on improving the ROV—and I'm looking forward to every failure along the way.

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